Robust watermarking technique for digital images utilizing the invariant relation of vector quantization indices

The digital property of multimedia has received significant attention in recent years. Robust watermarking of digital images and video for copyright protection is an important and challenging topic. In this paper, a watermarking method is presented which is based on vector quantization (VQ). In the proposed method, the watermark is related to the codebook that is permuted by an owner-specific random sequence. Also, the extraction of the watermark does not require the existence of the original image. The proposed method exploits the relation of VQ indices to provide the property of invisibility and robustness for various attacks. The experimental results in this work demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.